Motivational Quotes

Music

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

- Mann, Thomas

Best Quotes about Music

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Ruskin, John

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

10.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

11.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

12.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

13.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

14.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

15.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

16.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

17.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

18.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

19.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

21.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

22.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

23.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

24.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

25.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Tate, Jeffrey

26.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

27.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

28.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

29.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

30.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

31.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

32.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

33.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

34.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

35.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

36.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

37.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

38.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

39.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

40.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

41.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

42.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

43.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

44.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

45.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

46.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

47.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

48.

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.

Brown, James

49.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

50.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato